When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met Pakistan’s president at the NATO summit meeting in Chicago last week, the two spent most of the meeting talking politics, and Clinton was nothing if not blunt.
President Asif Ali Zardari complained about the difficulties of unifying Pakistan’s fractious political parties to support a more aggressive campaign against extremists and noted it was an election year in both countries.
“We don’t have the resources or control over these groups,” he said, referring to militants based in Pakistan’s borderlands. He added, “We’re backed into a corner because you haven’t apologized” for a NATO attack in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at an outpost on the border with Afghanistan.
Reflecting the Obama administration’s mounting frustration, Clinton told him that the only way countries have defeated insurgencies like the ones threatening Pakistan and its neighbor was by forging national unity and exercising political will.
“It’s going to take leadership,” she told a subdued Zardari, according to officials from both countries familiar with the hour-long meeting at McCormick Place last Sunday. “It’s going to take leadership from you and others” a report in New York Times said Monday.
Zardari’s visit to the summit meeting – after an 11th-hour invitation intended as a conciliatory gesture – went well for neither the United States nor Pakistan. It not only failed to resolve a six-month deadlock over the transportation of supplies to Afghanistan, but it also underscored the poisonous distrust and political chasms in an uneasy alliance that is central to the Obama administration’s plan to end the war in Afghanistan.
“You have to look at the meeting in context of whether it’s worth the investment having Pakistan as a partner,” one Obama administration official said bitingly. The best that official could say of Clinton’s meeting with Zardari was that it was “not a total waste” since she was able to deliver such a pointed message.
Far from moving toward some kind of easing of tension, relations have only worsened since then. On three days last week, American drones fired missiles at what were thought to be insurgent hideouts in northwestern Pakistan, ending a brief lull heading into the NATO summit meeting and ignoring demands by Pakistan’s Parliament to end the strikes altogether. And on Wednesday, a court in Pakistan convicted a doctor who helped the CIA in the search for Osama bin Laden, sentencing him to 33 years in prison for treason.
The next day the Senate approved a new cut of $33 million in American military assistance to Pakistan, $1 million for each year of his sentence.
The failed diplomacy of the last week highlighted the inability of both countries to repair a relationship that was badly frayed by the secret raid that killed Bin Laden in May of last year and then was nearly ruptured by the NATO attack in November. It has raised questions over whether even a more limited security relationship between the two countries is even possible.
“It’s an up-and-down relationship,” Defense Secretary Leon E Panetta said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Officials from both countries expressed a desire to resolve their differences, but it appeared that both were drifting ever farther apart. “We need to scale back expectations for each other,” Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, said in an interview.
For Zardari, the visit to Chicago was a political disaster at home, exposing the increasingly embattled president to blistering criticism. In a clear diplomatic slight, President Obama refused to hold a meeting with him, speaking to him for only a few minutes on the way to a group photograph of the world leaders who came to Chicago to map out an end to the war in Afghanistan.
While Obama later expressed support for “a successful, stable Pakistan,” he added, “I don’t want to paper over the differences there.”
Before the summit meeting in Chicago, the two sides appeared to narrow the difference, with Pakistan asking for $3,000 and the United States offering to pay up to $1,000. In hopes of finishing the deal, NATO extended a late invitation to Zardari to attend, but even the narrow issue of supply routes proved too divisive to resolve.
By the time Clinton sat down with Zardari, the administration had lowered its expectations. Tactically, the officials said, she pressed him to tell the NATO leaders that he was committed to resolving the dispute over the transit of supplies, which he did in a closed meeting the next day.
Most of Zardari’s meeting with Clinton was spent on his difficulties unifying the country’s political blocs. He responded defensively. “Zardari made it clear it’s an election season where he is, and he knows it is here, too,” one administration official said.
Clinton suggested specific ways to overcome the differences over counterterrorism operations – and to sell them to politicians in Pakistan. The officials declined to discuss those ideas, even on the condition of anonymity. The meeting ended without any clear commitments.
“The secretary,” the official said, “sought to make this very clear: Are you guys ready to move and get your whole leadership on the same page? Because sometimes it looks to us like you’re not.”
